You’re probably looking for a drop-dead-gorgeous last-minute gift to buy the early-Church-history nerds in your life. This is just the thing: Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art. It’s a big, coffee-table volume with photographs of hundreds of beautiful artworks and essays by the top scholars in the field.

Picturing the Bible is actually the companion volume to an exhibit by the same name, currently showing at Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. And what an exhibit! The only comparable collection of important paleochristian art I’ve seen is the permanent collection in the Vatican Museums — and many of the Vatican’s best pieces are in this exhibit at the Kimbell. I’m not exaggerating. If I had the cash, I’d be on a plane yesterday to see, up close and in one place, so many items that are the standard illustrations in the history texts — alongside several stunning (so-called) “magical gems” that rarely venture forth from the museums they call home. National Review posted something on the exhibit, and so did Touchstone.

But, whether or not you can fly to Fort Worth, do buy the book. The price is right. Here’s a partial table of contents:

1. The Earliest Christian Art: From Personal Salvation to Imperial Power (Jeffrey Spier)
2. Jewish Art and Biblical Exegesis in the Greco-Roman World (Steven Fine)
3. The Emergence of Christian Art (Mary Charles-Murray)
4. Early Christian Images and Exegesis (Robin M. Jensen)
5. Constantine the Great and Early Christian Art (Johannes G. Deckers)
6. Bright Gardens of Paradise (Herbert L. Kessler)
7. The Word Made Flesh in Early Decorated Bibles (Herbert L. Kessler)

The authors know the material, and they know how to present it afresh. Even if you’ve amassed a respectable library on early-Christian art (as I have), I can almost guarantee you’ll see in these pages several pieces you’ve never seen before. And all the contributors draw from deep knowledge of Christian theology, so there’s none of the bonehead speculation you sometimes find in books of art history by clueless secularists. Some readers will disagree strongly with the suggestion that the Constantinian “peace of the Church” brought about an essential change in Christian religion. The idea arises in at least a couple of these essays. But it’s never obnoxious. These scholars are respectful of their subject — the artistic product and the devotion of its practitioners.

Picturing the Bible belongs under your tree, either for you or for someone you love.

For other last-minute gift suggestions, see here.

One of our regular visitors, Joannie the Hoosier, tells us about the amazing new Vatican site, Biblia Clerus, that allows you to cross-reference biblical and liturgical texts with the homilies of the Church Fathers. These are the days of miracles and wonders.

Today’s Joannie’s birthday, by the way, so don’t forget to pray for her as she begins another great adventure in life.

Sometime commenter on this blog Kerry Crawford has a new book out, Lourdes Today: A Pilgrimage to Mary’s Grotto. Kerry dropped in when we discussed The Lourdes of the Ancient World, the Egyptian shrine of Abu Mena.

From CNS: Bethlehem’s Milk Grotto brings faith, hope and sometimes babies:

The rows of framed letters and baby pictures are testimony that the Milk Grotto — where Mary is said to have nursed Jesus as the Holy Family fled to Egypt — has been much more than a pilgrimage to many couples…

One after another, parents from such far-flung places as Sri Lanka, the United States, Canada, Bermuda and England have written about the miraculous birth of their children after having prayed using the “milk powder” from the grotto…

The grotto is at least 2,000 years old and the early Christians came to pray here, he said, but the first structure was built over it around 385. 

The faithful have venerated the spot for its powers as early as the fourth century, he said, and local women of all faiths and denominations come here to pray for children, taking with them bits of the “milk powder” from the soft limestone found throughout the grotto. 

Holes the width of a finger can be found in several spots in the grotto ceiling of the newly renovated shrine, where over the years people have scraped out the fine dust to take home with them…

Al Ahram has posted a review of The Churches of Egypt: From the Journey of the Holy Family to the Present Day. It looks like a lovely book.

I’m way behind on posting. In publishing, deadlines tend to get deferred till they bunch up like a carpet at the wall called “end of year.” In the apostolate, Advent means more speaking. All of this has meant less blogging. But I’ll try to catch up today.

Joe McClane, the Catholic Hack, has posted an MP3 of part 2 of our long interview on the Church Fathers. (Part 1 is here.)

I also appear regularly on several radio and TV shows, which post MP3s of my segments: EWTN (search programs on “Aquilina”); Familyland TV’s Weekly Roman Observer; Relevant Radio’s Searching the Word (you have to register, but it’s free); and, of course, KVSS. I show up weekly on Sacred Heart Radio’s Sonrise Morning Show, but those segments don’t seem to be posted yet.

Thanks to Teresa Benedetta for her speedy translation of Pope Benedict’s audience talk on St. Paulinus of Nola.

The Father of the Church to whom we turn our attention today is St. Paulinus of Nola. A contemporary of St. Augustine, to whom he was linked by a warm friendship, Paulinus exercised his ministry in Campania [Italian region of which Naples is the capital], at Nola, where he was a monk, then a priest and bishop.

But he was a native of Aquitaine in the south of France, from Bordeaux, where he was born to a well-placed family. Here he received a fine literary education, having the poet Ausonius as his teacher.

He left his homeland for the first time to pursue a precocious political career which saw him rise, while still young, to be governor of Campania. In this public position, he became admired for his gifts of wisdom and kindness. It was at this time that grace allowed the seed of conversion to germinate in his heart.

The stimulus came from the simple and intense faith with which the people honored the tomb of a saint, the martyr Felix, in the sanctuary of present-day Cimitile. As the public authority, Paulinus became interested in the shrine and ordered the construction of a hospice for the poor and a road in order to facilitate and provide more convenient access for so many pilgrims.

But while he worked to build a city on earth, he was also discovering the road towards the heavenly city. Thje encounter with Christ was the point of arrival in a laborious journey that was sown with trials. Sad circumstances, starting with the diminution of political authority, made him experience at first hand the transience of things.

Once he came to the faith, he would write: “Man without Crhist is dust and shadows” (Carme X, 289). Wanting to cast light on the sense of existence, he went to Milan to study in the school of St. Ambrose. He completed his Christian formation in his native land, where he was baptized by Bishop Delphin of Bordeaux.

His course of faith also included matrimony. He married Terasia, a pious noblewoman from Barcelona, with whom he had a son. He would have continued to live as a good Christian layman, had not the death of their son just a few days after his birth intervened to shake him up, showing him that God had a different plan for his life.

In effect, he felt himself called on to vow himself to Christ in a rigorous life of asceticism.

With the full consent of his wife Terasia, he sold all his possessions to give to the poor, and together with her, he left Aquitaine for Nola, where the couple took up lodging next to the Basilica of St. Felix, lving together in chaste fraternity, in a form of life which others soon joined.

The community rhythm was typically monastic, but Paulinus, who had been ordained a priest in Barcelona, took to engaging himself in the priestly ministry by attending to the pilgrims.

This earned him the sympathy and trust of the Christian community who, upon the death of their bishop, around 409, chose him to be his successor in the Seat of Nola.

His pastoral activity intensified, characterized by a particular attention to the poor. He left behind an image of an authentic Pastor of charity, as St. Gregory the Great describes him in Chapter II of his Dialogs, in which Paulinus is sculptured in the heroic gesture of offering himself to be prisoner in place of a widow’s son.

The episode is historically questioned, but he remains the figure of a Bishop with a big heart, who knew how to be near his people in the sad contingencies of the barbarian invasions.

The conversion of Paulinus impressed his contemporaries. But his teacher Ausonius, a pagan poet, felt ‘betrayed’ and wrote him sharp words, reproaaching him on the one hand with ‘scorn’ – thought to be foolish – of material things, and on the other hand, of abandoning the vocation of a man of letters.

Paulinus replied that giving to the poor did not mean a disdain for earthly goods, but rather an appreciation of them for the higher purpose of charity.

As for his literary efforts, Paulinus took leave, not of his poetic talent, which he would continue to cultivate, but of the poetic models inspired by pagan mythology and ideals. A new aesthetic now governed his sensibility: the beauty of God incarnate, crucified and risen, of whom he made himself minstrel.

He had not left poetry at all, but now drew his inspiration from the Gospel, as he says int his verse: “For me the only art is faith, and Christ my poetry” (“At nobis ars una fides, et musica Christus”: Carme XX, 32).

His poems are songs of faith and love, in which the daily stories of ordinary men and great events are seen as part of the story of salvation, as the story of God with us. Many of these compositions, the so-called ‘Carmi natalizi’ (Birthday peoms), are linked to the annual feast of the martyr Felix whom Paulinus had chosen to be his heavenly patron.

In remembering St. Felix, he meant to glorify Christ himself, convinced that the intercession of the saint had obtained for him the grace of conversion: “In your light, oh joyous one, I have loved Christ” (Carme XXI, 373).

He wanted to express this same concept in widening the space of the sanctuary with a new basilica, which he ordered decorated such that the paintings, with appropriate captions, would constitute for the pilgrims a visible catechism.

He explained his plan in a poem deidcated to another great catechist, St. Niceta of Remesiana, as he accompanied him on a visit of his different churches: “Now I would like you to contemplate the pictures which unfold in a long series on the walls…It seemed useful to us to represent sacred subjects in pictures throughout the house of Felix, in the hope that, on seeing these pictures, the image may inspire further interest in the amazed minds of country folk” (Carme XXVII, vv. 511.580-583).

Even today we can still admire what remains of those paintings, which give the Saint of Nola full right to being among the referernce points of Christian archaeology.

In the ascetic community of Cimitile, life went on in poverty and prayer, everything imemrsed in ‘lectio divina’ – Scripture that was read, meditated, assimilated, was the light under wich the Saint of Nola scrutinized his own soul in its drive to perfection.

To those who admired his decision to abandon material wealth, he reminded them that the gesture was still far from representing full conversion: “The abandonment or the sale of the temporal goods one possessed does not constitute the fulfillment but only the beginning of the course to be run… It is not the goal but only the starting point. In fact, the athlete does not win until he strips himself, because he takes off his clothes to begin the struggle, and only he who has fought out of duty is worthy of being crowned victor” (cfr Ep. XXIV, 7 to Sulpicio Severo).

Besides asceticism and the Word of God, there was charity: in the monastic community, the poor were at home. Paulinus did not limit his help to alms: he welcomed them as if they were Chtrist himself. He had reserved for them a part of the monastery, and doing so, it seemed to him that he was not giving as much as receiving, in the exchange of gifts between the hospitality that is offered and the prayerful gratitude of the recipients.

He called the poor his ‘patrons’ (cfr Ep. XIII,11 to Pammachio) and, observing that they were lodged in the lower floor, he loved to say that their prayers made up the foundation of the house (cfr Carme XXI, 393-394).
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St, Paulinus did not write theological treatises, but his poems and his dense epistolary are rich with a theology that was lived, interwoven with the Word of God that was constantly scrutinized as light for life.

In particular, there emerges a sense of the Church as a mystery of unity. Communion was lived by him above all through a distinctive practice of spiritual friendship. Paulinus was a true master of this, making his life a crosssroads of chosen souls: from Martin of Tours to St. Jerome, from Ambrose to Augustine, from Deplhin of Bordeaux to Njceta of Remesiana, from Vitritius of Rouen to Rufinus of Aquileia, from Pammachius to Sulpicius Severus, and so many others, well-known or less.

Hidden among all this are the intense pages he wrote to Augustine. Beyond the contents of the individual letters, one is impressed by the warmth with which the Saint of Nola sings about friendship itself as a manifestation of the only Body of Christ animated by the Holy Spirit.

Here is a significant excerpt at the start of the correspondence between the two friends: “It is not to be wondered if we, though far apart, are present to each other, and without having met, we know each other, because we are members of the smae body, we have one head, we are flooded by the same grace, we live of the same bread, we walk along one path, we live in the same house” (Ep. 6, 2).

We can see it is a beautiful description of what it means to be a Christian, to be the Body of Christ, to live in the communion of the Church.Tthe theology of our time has found precisely in the concept of communion the key to approaching the mystery of the Church.

The testimony of St. Paulinus of Nola helps us to feel the Church as it is presented to us by the Second Vatican Council – as a sacrament of intimate union with God, and therefore the unity of us all, and finally, that of the entire human race (cfr Lumen gentium, 1).

In this perspective, I wish you all a good Advent season.

You can get a half-hour MP3 of me blathering about the Fathers at The Catholic Hack. Advent is a penitential season, after all. Joe has another half-hour coming up soon.

Happy St. Ambrose day! To mark the day, you can track back to my back posts on Ambrose … read the Holy Father’s recent audience talk on Ambrose, or buy a good book.

Jeff Ziegler gives us these feast-day links on St. Nicholas:

— Today is … the optional memorial of St. Nicholas, (d. fourth cent.), bishop, patron of children, bankers, pawnbrokers, sailors, perfumers, brides, unmarried women, travelers, fishermen, dockworkers, brewers, poets, prisoners, Russia, Greece, Sicily, Lorraine, and Apulia.
— Pope Benedict in Bari (2005), where the saint’s relics are venerated.
— Beato Angelico, “Stories of St Nicholas of Bari.”

And I posted this post last month, on The Original North Pole.

There’s a certain kind of Catholic who likes nothing more than a good inter-Christian tussle. Their model, among the ancient Christians, is no doubt St. Nicholas of Myra, whose feast day we celebrate today. He reportedly punched the heretic Arius in the nose at the Council of Nicea. (Yes, I mean Santa Claus. And the story goes that a profusion of blood came forth from Arius. “Happy holidays, infidel.”)

Now, don’t get me wrong: I have a great devotion to St. Nicholas. In fact, he’s one of the handful of saints whose intercession I invoke every day of my life. But his was not the only way the Church Fathers approached ecumenism.

Consider Pope Zephyrinus, in the second century. In the midst of fierce persecution from imperial Rome, the poor guy also had to face heresies and moral lapses within the Church. The situation grew to scandal proportions, but he endured it patiently. In fact, some rigorists thought he was far too patient with heretics and sinners. The rigorists’ own holy impatience soon turned ugly — and unholy — as they declared the Pope anathema and the worldwide Church his “sect.” (I love it — the sect of the Catholics.) Meanwhile, they dubbed their own little congregation “the Catholic Church.” They elected history’s first antipope — a man who, in his rather extreme aggression, tended to over-correct the errors of the heretics and fall into the heresies on the opposite side of the tracks.

St. Zephyrinus remained steady and orthodox. He knew when to pull his punches, just as St. Nicholas allegedly knew when to throw them. As someone once said, there is “a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace” (Eccl 3:7-8).

Still today, it’s easy for armchair pontiffs to grumble about the perceived weaknesses of the real popes. It’s the real ones who have the thankless job of discerning the seasons of the carrot and the seasons of the stick. We should avoid grumbling and learn patience from history.

The Church of the Fathers suffered many divisions — schisms, heresies, and outright apostasies. There were certainly occasions for excommunication, but prayer for unity was always in season. And we can be sure that all those prayers of the Fathers will one day be answered. Many, in fact, were answered, in short order and rather definitively, as the ancient heresies exhausted themselves. Sometimes it took centuries, but the Montanists, Marcionites, Arians, Apollinarians, and Monothelites all went the way of the wooly mammoth.

One of the most painful divisions in Christian antiquity was the schism that rent the “Persian” East from the “Roman” West. It happened with the Nestorian schism in the fifth century, when a serious doctrinal dispute gained further momentum from cultural and political tensions. The division has lasted now for a millennium and a half.

There are Catholics, no doubt, who would consider this division a “cold case,” meriting no further attention. But Pope John Paul II chose to give it his closest attention. He encouraged the dialogue. And in 1994, he signed a “Common Christological Declaration” with Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV of the Church of the East, essentially resolving “the main dogmatic problem between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church.” In 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity went a step further and approved the sharing of Communion between the (Catholic) Chaldean Church and the (so-called Nestorian) Assyrian Church of the East.

We should marvel that reconciliation should proceed so swiftly after a millennium and a half of alienation. We should marvel at the stunning fact of intercommunion. And, again, we should learn from history: ecumenism proceeds best on God’s schedule, not ours.

We should pray for unity. And we should rest assured, as the Fathers did, that our prayer will be answered; for it is the prayer of Jesus (see Jn 17:11).

Oh, and it’s probably best if we hold our punches. That pugilistic Santa Claus story is almost unique in ancient Church history, and scholars tell us it’s of dubious origin anyway.

Pope Benedict continues his Wednesday teachings on the Church Fathers. This unofficial translation is from Teresa Benedetta:

Dear brothers and sisters!

In the last catecheses, we made an excursion to the Semitic-speaking Churches of the East, meditating on the Persian Aphraates and the Syrian St. Ephrem. Today, we return to the Latin world, in the North of the Roman Empire, with St. Chromatius of Aquileia.

This bishop carried out his ministry in the ancient Church of Aquileia, fervent center of Christian life in the tenth region of the Roman Empire, which was composed of Venetia and Histria.

In 368, when Chromatius ascended the episcopal seat of the city, the local Christian community had already matured with a glorious history of loyalty to the Gospel. Between the middle of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, the persecutions of Decius, Valerian and Diocletian had reaped a great number of martyrs.

Moreover, the Church of Aquileia was threatened like many other churches at the time by the Arian heresy. Athanasius himself – standard bezarer of the Nicene Creed, whom the Arians had chased into exile – found refuge in Aquileia for a time. Under the leadership of its bishops, the Christian community resisted the snares of heresy, reinforcing its adherence to the Catholic faith.

In September 381, Aquileia was the site of a Synod which convened 35 bishops from the African coast, the valley of the Rhone, and all of the empire’s tenth region. The Synod was called to vanquish the last traces of Arianism in the West.

Taking part in the Synod was the priest Chromatius, as an expert for the Bishop of Aquileia, Valerian (370/1-387/8). The years around the Syond of 381 constituted the ‘golden age’ of the Aquileian community.

St. Jerome, who was a native of Dalmatia, and Rufinus of Concord, spoke with nostalgia about their stay in Aquileia (370-373), in that sort of theoligical cenacle which Jerome did not hesitate to define as tanquam chorus beatorum – like a choir of blessed ones’ (Cronaca: PL XXVII,697-698).

This cenacle – which recalled in certain aspects the communal experiments carried out by Eusebius of Vercelli and by Augustine – formed the most noteworthy personages of the Churches of the Upper Adriatic region.

Already within his family, Chromatius had learned to know and love Christ. St. Jerome himself spoke about this with great admiration, likening Chromatius’s mother to the prophetess Anna, his two sisters to the prudent virgins of the Gospel parable, Chromatius himself and his brother Eusebius to the young Samuel (cfr Ep VII: PL XXII,341).

Of Chromatius and Eusebius, Jerome further wrote: “The blessed Chromatius and St. Eusebius were brothers by blood but not less in the identity of their ideals” ((Ep. VIII: PL XXII,342).

Chromatius was born in Aquileia around 345. He was ordained deacon and later priest, finally being elected Pastor of that Church, around 388. After receiving his episcopal ordination from Bishop Ambrose, he dedicated himself with courage and energy to a task that was enormous for the sheer vastness of the terriotry entrusted to his ministry: the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Aqwuileia extended from northern Italy to the territories of present-day Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria and Slovenia, up to the borders of Hungary.

One can deduce how well-known and respected Chromatius was in the Churches of his time from an episode in the life of St. John Chyrsostom. When the Bishop of Constantinople was exiled from his seat, he wrote three letters to those he considered the most important Bishops of the West, to ask them to get him support from the emperors – he wrote one to the Bishop of Rome, the second to the Bishop of Milan, and the third to the Bishop of Aquileia, Chromatius.

But even for Chromatius, those were difficult times because of the precarious political situation. Most probably, he died in exile, in Grado, while he was trying to flee from barbarian incursions in 407, the same year when the Chrysostom also died.

In prestige and importance, Aquileia was the fourth in the Italian peninsula, and the ninth in the Roman empire – which made it a target for the Goths and the Huns. Besides causing grave wars and destruction, the barbarian invasions seriously compromised the transmission of the works of the Fathers preserved in the episcopal library which had a wealth of codices.

And so, even the writings of St. Chromatius were dispersed here and there, often ending up being attributed to other authors such as John Chrysostom (mostly because both names started with ‘Chr’), or Augustine or Ambrose, or even Jerome himself, whom Chromatius had helped a lot in the textual review and Latin translation of the Bible.

The rediscovery of a great part of Chromatius’s work is owed to happy and fortunate circumstances that in recent years has allowed a reconstruction of a body of writing that is quite consistent: more than 40 sermons, about 10 of which are fragmentary, and more than 60 treatises of commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.

Chromatius was a wise teacher and zealous pastor. His first and primary task was to listen to the Word in order to be able to annouce it himself. In his teachings, he always started with the Word of God and led back up to it. Some themes were particularly dear to him: above all, the mystery of the Trinity, reflecting on it, as it is revealed throughout the history of salvation.

Then, the subject of the Holy Spirit: Chromatius constantly called the attention of the faithful to the presence and action int he life of the Church of the Third Person in the Most Holy Trinity.

But Chromatius was particularly persistent on the mystery of Christ: The Word incarnate as true God and true man, who assumed complete humanity to make a gift of his own divinity. These truths, which he insistently reaffirmed even for anti-Arian purposes, would come to be formalized 50 years later in the Council of Chalcedon.

His strong emphasis on the human nature of Christ led Chromatius to speak often of the Virgin Mary: his Mariologic doctrine was terse and precise. To him we owe some evocative descriptions of the Most Holy Virgin: Mary is the “evangelical virgin who was capable of sheltering God”; she is the ‘immaculate and inviolate lamb’ who gave birth to ‘the lamb draped in red’ (cfr Sermo XXIII,3: Scrittori dell’area santambrosiana 3/1, p. 134).

The Bishop of Aquileia often spoke of the Virgin in relation to the Church: both, in fact, are ‘virgins’ and ‘mothers’. But his ecclesiology was developed above all in his commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew.

Here are some of his recurrent concepts: the church is unique; it was born from the blood of Christ; it is a precious garment woven by the Holy Spirit; the Church is the place which proclaims that Christ was born of the Virgin and where brotherhood and concord flourish.

An image that Chromatius was particularly fond of was that of a ship at sea in a storm – he lived in tempetuous times, as we heard earlier: “There is no doubt,” the holy Bishop said, “that this ship represents the Church.” (cfr Tract. XLII,5: Scrittori dell’area santambrosiana 3/2, p. 260).

As the zealous pastor that he was, Chromatius knew how to speak to his people in a language that was fresh, colorful and incisive. Although he knew Latin perfectly, he prefered to use popular language which was rich in easily understandable images.

Thus, for example, using the sea as a metaphor, he contrasts, on the one hand, the act of fishing in which fish, once out of the water, die; and on the other, the preaching of the gospel, thanks to which men are saved from the muddy waters of death and introduced to true life (cfr Tract. XVI,3: Scrittori dell’area santambrosiana 3/2, p. 106).

Still looking at him as a good pastor, who lived in a stormy era darkened by barbarian incursions, he placed himself alongside his flock to comfort them and open up their spirits to trust in God, who never abandones his children.

Let us pick up, at the end of these reflections, an exhortation of Chromatius which is still perfectly valid today: “Let us pray to the Lord with all our heart and all our faith,” the Bishop of Aquileia, recommended in one of his Sermons. “Let us pray that he may liberate us from every incursion by enemies, from every fear of adversaries. He does not look at our merits – he who in the past deigned to liberate the children of Israel not because of their merits but by his mercy. May he protect us with his usual merciful love, and work for us what the holy Moses told the children of Israel: ‘The Lord will fight in your defense, and you will remain silent. It is him who fights, it is him who gains victory’…And so that he may deign to do this, we must pray as much as we can. He himself tells us through the prophet’s mouth: I will liberate you, and you will give me glory.” (Sermo XVI,4: Scrittori dell’area santambrosiana 3/1, pp. 100-102).

Thus, at the start of Advent, St. Chromatius reminds us that Advent is a time of prayer, in which we must enter into contact with God. God knows us, he knows me, he knows each of us, he wishes me well, he will not abandon me.

Let us move forward with such confidence in God during this liturgical period that has just begun.